The Favorites: A Heron Sells Moore's Throat Lozenges

A white heron runs the full height of the card, neck folded back into its S curve, one long leg planted, the whole bird drawn in a few creamy strokes and red accents against a ground of pure black. Over and under it run the words MOORE'S THROAT & LUNG LOZENGES and, in big confident lettering, the slogan the brand staked everything on: THE FAVORITES.

Moore's was a patent medicine of the great unregulated era of American pharmacy, and its lozenges came from the years when the most inventive advertising in the country was not posters or magazines but something smaller and stranger: the trade card, a pocket sized chromolithograph handed out by the million, and often, as here, designed to be far too beautiful to throw away.

From the Collection

Vintage Moore’s Throat & Lung Lozenges Victorian Poster – Crane Advertising Print

Victorian patent medicine advertising in the trade card tradition: Moore's Throat and Lung Lozenges, 1880s.

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Print Details

• Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
• Unframed: 12″ × 18″, 20″ × 30″ or 24″ × 36″
• Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
• Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery

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The Trade Card Era

In the 1870s and 1880s, improvements in chromolithography put cheap, saturated color printing into every merchant's hands, and American business responded with the trade card: a small card, product on one side, picture on the other, given away at counters, tucked into packages, slipped into letters. Cards advertised everything from sewing machines to soap, but nobody used them like the patent medicine makers, whose margins were enormous, whose claims were unbounded, and whose customers had to be reached in a country too big for salesmen.

The cards worked because people collected them. Victorian households pasted them into scrapbooks by the hundred, children traded them, and a medicine brand that issued a handsome series, birds, flowers, actresses, children at play, could count on its name sitting in the family album for years. University collections, such as the patent medicine trade card holdings at East Carolina University's Laupus Library, preserve Moore's cards among them: the heron survives because it was made to be kept.

Why a Heron for a Throat Lozenge

Patent medicine imagery rarely illustrates the ailment; nobody wants to look at a diseased lung in a scrapbook. It illustrates an emblem instead, and the heron was a shrewd choice for a throat remedy. The bird is all neck, that long, elegant, articulated throat displayed in profile like a diagram of the very organ the lozenges claimed to soothe, graceful where the claim was gentleness, wild and clean where the product promised purity. The slogan did the rest of the work. The Favorites asserts a popularity the buyer is invited simply to join, the oldest trick in the patent medicine copybook and still in daily use.

The customers Moore's courted were the voice professions: singers, clergy, lecturers, teachers, actors, everyone whose living depended on a throat that could not be allowed to fail on a Sunday morning or an opening night. Throat and lung lozenges, cough drops and vocal pastilles formed a whole shelf of the trade, sold on the promise that a public voice could be medicated like an instrument. Whether the lozenges did more than any sugared pastille is a question the era's regulators were only beginning to ask.

Scrapbooks and Survival

The reason this heron can be identified and studied at all is the scrapbook. Trade cards were printed in numbers that defy comprehension, and nearly all of them were destroyed by the ordinary fate of paper; what saved the best designs was the Victorian collecting habit, which turned the cards into album pieces, sorted by subject and admired in parlors. Bird series were prime album material, and a medicine brand that put a graceful heron on its card was, wittingly or not, designing for the album rather than the apothecary shelf.

Modern collections inherit that curation. The patent medicine trade cards held by university libraries today, thousands strong, are essentially the Victorian scrapbooks disbound and cataloged, and they preserve a cross section of American commercial art at its most exuberant and least supervised. The Moore's heron keeps its place in that company not because the lozenges were remarkable, but because the card was: a small, exact demonstration that in the 1880s, the liveliest print design in America was being given away free with a purchase.

The End of the Unregulated Era

The world that produced this card ended by statute. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, pushed through after years of muckraking exposure of the patent medicine trade, forced labels to tell some truth and began the long federal supervision of American medicine. The wild advertising menagerie, the herons and ostriches and sunsets enlisted to sell syrups and bitters, faded with the claims that paid for it, and the trade card itself was already giving way to the magazine advertisement and the coupon.

What survives is the art, because the art was the point of sale. The Moore's heron, decorative enough to outlive its product by a century, black ground, cream bird, scarlet type out of the Japanese influenced design language of the 1880s, is a fair emblem of the whole episode: American advertising learning, on a card small enough to hold in one hand, that beauty moves goods. The lozenges are long gone. The favorite remains.